Open RAN is failing to deliver on its ultimate promise

The research firm predicts that by 2028, Open RAN will account for more than 25% of the total RAN market, which is more or less unchanged from its prediction in February that it would account for 20-30%. Cloud RAN is expected to capture 20-25% of the market.

However, when it comes to multi-vendor RAN – which was essentially the fundamental idea behind the whole Open RAN movement – this is where things get disappointing. Dell'Oro expects multi-vendor to account for less than 10% of the global RAN market by 2028.

"Open RAN is happening, but this vision that Open RAN will significantly change the vendor dynamics is fading," said Stefan Pongratz, vice president of RAN market research at Dell'Oro.

The big hope for Open RAN was that it would flood the market with a tsunami of innovative, competitively-priced vendors, leaving operators spoilt for choice as to whose products they could use in their networks. By extension, it was also hoped that Open RAN would make it less costly for Western operators to replace equipment supplied by China's Huawei and ZTE.

The reality today is markedly mundane. Operators are still interested in deploying Open RAN, but most of them are using products from familiar names like Ericsson, Nokia, and – albeit to a slightly lesser degree – Samsung.

With the notable exception of CSPs in Germany, most telcos that needed to replace Chinese-made kit are well on their way to doing so, and as such, one of the driving forces behind Open RAN is ebbing away.

Most Open RAN deployments appear to be on the smaller and more targeted side, rather than big and bold.

There are one or two greenfield operators here and there that are going with cloud-based Open RAN networks. Also, AT&T made waves late last year when it announced its $14 billion Open RAN deployment in partnership with Ericsson. Vodafone a few years earlier caused a similar stir by announcing plans to adopt Open RAN in Europe, giving a major role to Samsung.

But these are the exceptions, not the rule.

Open RAN's travails have been exacerbated by a downturn in operator capex, which when combined with the movement's glacial progress has led at least one vendor – Airspan – to file for Chapter 11.

Dell'Oro is still confident that Open RAN is here to stay, as more operators gradually incorporate more openness, virtualisation, intelligence, and automation into their RAN roadmaps.

"With most of the leading RAN suppliers now committed to the latest O-RAN fronthaul interfaces, the question now is more about the timing and the adoption curve for the various RAN segments," said Pongratz.

All very prudent and pragmatic, but hardly what you'd call exciting – much less revolutionary.